The “Magician of Finance” of Lebanon has fallen out of favor. Also in his own country, where he was believed untouchable. After years of international recognition, Riyad Salameh, the alleged architect of the financial stability that Lebanon enjoyed for decades (then considered miraculous, but sustained by a pyramidal scam) is detained in Beirut with a little flattering judicial future. The governor of the Central Bank for 30 years, until 2023, is accused of embezzling hundreds of millions of euros and acquiring with illicit funds luxury properties in the main western capitals. The framework that benefited its environment is subject to investigations in a dozen countries. The Lebanese authorities, which are personally in some of these causes, are now raised to claim compensation that could reach 1,000 million dollars, according to judicial sources. The progress of cases abroad threatens to uncover the bad practices of a whole generation of leaders who left the sinking of Lebanon as a legacy in what the World Bank has defined as one of the most serious economic crises since the mid -nineteenth century.
The investigations around the governor’s family began on European soil in 2020, in what would be known as Forry case. This process, with open investigations all over the world, investigates the way Salameh and his brother allegedly diverted more than 300 million dollars from the Central Bank abroad from 2002. years in which he accumulated awards by leaders such as the then French president, Nicolas Sarkozy. In Lebanon, investigations for the Forry case They stagnated shortly after starting in 2023.
In September 2024, Salameh was arrested in his country for a case of smelly, but less. Seeing the powerful former governor of the Central Bank in police hands surprised the Lebanese, who continued to consider him untouchable within his borders, despite the multiple suspicions of financial crimes. At that time, he already accumulated international arrest orders; and the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada had sanctioned it.
It was another Salameh who smiled in the photographs since the then prime minister, Rafic Hariri, appointed him governor of the Central Bank at the end of the Civil War, in 1990. They had worked together in the private sphere. The successive governments renewed the mandate, making it of the longestions on the planet among their counterparts. Salameh, originally from a Maronite Christian family, was considered for decades a wizard of finance, for the resilience of the national economy during periods of conflict and political chaos. Neither the murder of Hariri himself, nor the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, nor the conflict in neighboring Syria since 2011 and their refugee flow, altered the fixed change between the local currency and the dollar. He held it artificially – already dessert, with dire consequences – in a country with hardly any industry or exports.
The secret was that, since 2013, coinciding with the decline in the arrival of capitals to Lebanon, Salameh helped build an international pyramid scam, according to accusations in court. The Lebanese banking system – where uncomfortable questions are not asked – began offering high interest to depositaries. Interests were not generated through exports or investments, but with the arrival of new customers. Jad Chaaban, a doctor in economics and professor at the Institute of Graduate Studies of Doha, who has analyzed the relationship between the political and financial powers in Lebanon, says that the wheel held the value of the pound before the dollar, financed the government through loans and allowed them to take their part. Sometimes, he points out, the annual benefit between this and others agreed by the main actors in the country was equivalent to 20% of the gross domestic product (GDP): “It supervised a system that left a hole of more than 40,000 million dollars,” summarizes.
The true legacy of the governor and the generation of Lebanese leaders who accompanied him during five years crystallized from 2019, when the snowball stopped turning. It coincided with a wave of unprecedented protests accused of the political class of corruption. In just a few months, the banks restricted access to the capitals, unemployment shot and the pound lost much of its value, after 22 years with a fixed exchange rate from the dollar. The salaries of the majority of the population were equivalent to dozens of dollars and chaos unleashed. The police did not see why pursuing malefactors in exchange for virtually anything, already the teachers did not reach them to pay gasoline and go to schools. Many Lebanese immediately pointed to Salameh as one of those responsible for the diverse fall of their living conditions.
The first accusations against the governor came from Switzerland, where he had fortunes in different banking entities. Some are now under suspicion. The Swiss Research Organization EyE has released this March that Banco HSBC received doubtful transfers from the Libanés Central Bank for a decade. According to Public Eye, internal HSBC reports cataloged the transactions of doubtful, but the Swiss bank ignored the alerts and did not denounce the movements to the anti -corruption authorities of the country until August 2020, when the frustration against Salameh was expressed in the streets of Lebanon.
An incident in June 2021, with the country in bankruptcy and the anxious population of dollars to the Batacazo of the national currency, reflected the abyss between the then governor and his fellow citizens. Upon arrival on board a private jet to the French airport of Le Bourget, the operators found the equivalent of almost 100,000 euros in metallic not declared. The governor replied that he had forgotten that he was carrying them, according to police records accessed by the newspaper Financial Times.
The Swiss revelations promoted the efforts of Accountability Now, a foundation that works against the impunity of the Lebanese elites and has filed complaints in multiple European countries. “It’s like Russian dolls,” says one of his lawyers who follows the case, Zena Wakim. “When you raise one, another appears. As the processes advance, the information appears almost by accident,” he explains.
The lawyer frames the former governor of the Central Bank in an ecosystem. Therefore, in France (whose justice issued an international arrest warrant in 2023 after not going to a judicial hearing) Salameh is suspected of “Association of Malhechores”, a legal figure that defines a group constituted to perpetrate crimes punished with at least five years in jail. “Without this association, this mass fraud could not have happened,” he says to this newspaper. The insistence of research in Europe, he says, has made Lebanese leaders change their strategy. Now, “that Pandora’s box is opening,” prefer to initiate processes that can control within the national judicial system and reduce the authority of the European courts to judge them.
The national authorities, now person in cases in France or Switzerland, could claim asset recovery. Jean Tannous, former -fiscal who led an investigation against the governor paused in 2021 for political interference, encrypted them to the newspaper The National up to 1 billion dollars. “Attending in foreign investigations is a strategy to control the money and bring it back to Lebanon. It allows them to check what happens in the procedures,” says Wakim.
